News and resources on French thinker Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

For the complete graph where you able to see Foucault’s influence see here

Editor: As Simon Raper who put together this graph observes the data used is drawn from the ‘influenced by’ section on Wikipedia pages about philosophers and thus only delineates Foucault in relation to other figures designated as philosophers. Arguably Foucault’s impact outside the narrow confines of the field of philosophy is far wider.

If you are interested in this data set you might like my latest post where I use it to make book recommendations.

This one came about because I was searching for a data set on horror films (don’t ask) and ended up with one describing the links between philosophers.

To cut a long story very short I’ve extracted the information in the influenced by section for every philosopher on Wikipedia and used it to construct a network which I’ve then visualised using gephi

It’s an easy process to repeat. It could be done for any area within Wikipedia where the information forms a network. I chose philosophy because firstly the influences section is very well maintained and secondly I know a little bit about it. At the bottom of this post I’ve described how I got there.

First I’ll show why I think it’s worked as a visualisation. Here’s the…